


Heartbreak Hotel

by sedirktive (orphan_account)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - After College/University, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, But they're both consenting., Drunk Sex, Friends With Benefits, Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, I guess you could call that dubcon?, M/M, Still though., dubcon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-19
Updated: 2016-01-03
Packaged: 2018-03-18 16:14:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3575751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/sedirktive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You’re thinking about dust motes, about taking yourself outside for a smoke, about phallic bear carvings, about how it all started.</p><p>You wonder to yourself why it all started the way it did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Intro

**Author's Note:**

> Art is by tumblr's awesome harveychan <333

The Heartbreak Hotel is not a big place.

It’s just off Exit 5 of the highway, at the corner of 12th and Cedar.

It’s not far enough from the city that you can’t get to work with minimal fiasco if you oversleep on the really bad nights. The location borders an old convenience store, a cluster of buildings that calls itself a town, and a hill which sits under the house of a wrinkled old man who carves logs into bears and other furry forest friends.

That old man sells his statues on the internet for $200 each.

They’re really not bad, actually. You’ve actually considered buying one once or twice, just so that you can lug it back to Texas for Christmas, but the dude just laughed and shook his head when you asked (very seriously, mind you) if he’d carve a bear with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s physique and wearing a thong to cover his MASSIVE (emphasis on MASSIVE, you told him, holding up your hands to give him an idea of just how MASSIVE it has to be to qualify) dick, so that was the end of that.

John said between fits of laughter that he would appreciate a statue like that, though.

The hotel is not gaudy, or well-taken care of, or nice at all really. The sheets are slightly off-white and stained, giving that sort of “have these been washed since their last guests” appeal, sometimes the bathroom lights don’t work, the wallpaper peels like crazy when the sun is unforgiving, and the TV sets only get 10 channels. A handful of news, the shopping channel, and PBS.

Sometimes, depending on the room, the sofa will smell very faintly of stale febreeze and something that nobody can quite place but everyone can recognize. You think it might be burned hair or cat puke. It’s hard to tell.

Honestly, it’s less of a hotel and more of a resort.

A last resort.

Badum tsss.

And on the days when you are being completely, brutally honest, it’s not even really called the Heartbreak Hotel. It’s nothing more than a rundown motel that doesn’t have a real name, just a big neon sign out front that screams ‘MOTEL’ in red letters and sort of shouts but doesn’t really scream ‘VACANCY’ in white right below(and always vacancy because nobody ever really wants to stay there for too long).

Sometimes, if you and John are feeling generous, you try to give it another name. The two of you often go back and forth between Pooradise, Shit City, Vegas 2.0, and Larry.

Larry is your personal favorite, but will always be just less fitting than the Heartbreak Hotel.

In a way, it’s sort of… perfect.

You’re lying on your stomach in the bed, an unlit cigarette raised to your lips more out of habit than an actual desire to light it up and smoke it down. There are little flecks of dust passing in and out of the single beam of light prying its way between the curtains.  You sort of get sad when they slip out of the sunbeam and disappear.

John is there too, of course.

You don’t go to the Heartbreak Hotel with anyone else. He probably doesn’t either.

He’s laying on his back with his mucho hairy legs stretched in some sort of funky position that only sleep could make comfortable and his mouth is open so that you can see the rows of only-crooked-if-you’re-paying-attention teeth. And he is snoring.

The sound, you decide as you twirl the rolled up stick tobacco between your fingers, is comparable to that of a chainsaw with a bad cold as it serenades its paramour (whom can only be Bigfoot) with a painfully bad rendition of One Direction’s What Makes You Beautiful.

Any other day, you’d record his snores to make a few sick holiday remixes for his next Christmas gift.

Today, however, you’re sitting here trying not to watch him sleep and thinking thinking thinking. You’re thinking about dust motes, about taking yourself outside for a smoke, about phallic bear carvings, about how it all started.

You wonder to yourself why it all started the way it did.


	2. Prom Night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> LATE LATE LATE its not even reasonably late i am so sORRY i got a beta tho (@spencer this one is for u and u know it bae)
> 
> theres some sex hizzappening in this chapter at the end to make up for it i am so sorry
> 
> also make way for tween dave the WORST kind

He was twelve (and a half) and you were thirteen when you met him on Omegle. You, with your vast track record on the site, were the trolling master, and leapt from call to call sending people a Youtube link to the musical masterpiece that was Photograph by Nickelback.

Oh yes. You were the coolest kid.

So coming across this nerdy kid with big glasses and unruly hair just made you snort. Internally. Because  at that age, you were a man, and being a man meant being a lean, mean, emotionless machine that flexed in front of girls and pretended to have muscle because muscle was cool and you were fucking cool.

 _What a nerd_ , you’d told yourself as you pasted the link into the chat bar with the message “wow look at these super cute cats bro” and absolutely no expression whatsoever. _The poor sucker’s gonna be so disappointed when he realizes they’re not cats_.

There was a beat of silence before [Stranger] grinned and started typing back.

_oh wow i love nickelback! do you wanna hear my favorite song by him?_

Huh.

Weird.

**sure lay it on me four-eyes**

_woooow you’re so creative._

_anyways listen to this!_

He sent you [a link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSBcnu0Vyos) and you should have seen it coming.

Thirteen year-old you was so naïve and not used to such a worthy opponent. 

Oh. Shit.

There was nothing more shameful to a kid as utterly cool as you than being rick-rolled and he’d hooked you up with the 10 hour looping version too, god dammit.

**damn**

**okay**

**you got me**

_heck yeah i did._

_i don’t even like nickelback, you turd. nobody does._

He called you a turd and you weren’t having any of that. After the two of you exchanged a few choice words, you seemed to have mutually decided that the other was pretty okay and proceeded to trade chumhandles when his dad came in to tell him it was bedtime.

And it was all sort of downhill from there because it didn’t take you two very long to realized that you only lived an hour across town from each other.

Chat clients were followed by Skype calls were followed by meet-ups were followed by sleepovers. The only way it was possibly made better was when you two ended up going to the same high school thanks to funky district shenanigans.

Going to school with John was a relief really, because you had a lot of “friends” in junior high that you didn’t really like but sort of felt obligated to hang around because they thought you were cool and you thought you were cool too. By high school, you stopped giving a shit about being some sort of rad sunglasses-wearing egoist and let yourself be true to yourself: a douchey sunglasses-wearing egoist who was a shit rather than being the shit.

You ran track to make use of those god forsaken ostrich legs of yours. You joined the school newspaper and wrote satirical articles about dumb jocks and political policies. You joined the Science club to watch shit explode and dissect small animals (whose innards may or may not have made their way home with you from time to time). You played with the tabletop game club because DnD gave you an excuse to wear the sicknastiest beard known to man.

Maybe you dabbled in the Polka club a little, but you’d swear to anyone that asked that it was a phase and being president was just an accident. The title was hefted onto you by democracy dammit.

Your old “friends” didn’t like you as much once you stopped caring about some hokey dream to start a garage band or smoking out behind the bleachers because it was intense. They definitely didn’t like it when you started caring about grades and extracurriculars because “Like fuck you’re not going out without a bang,” your brother had told you as he pulled a trap door in the ceiling to unleash the fury of a thousand school club pamphlets onto your head. Sifting through the papercuts, you’d found things that actually sounded… sort of neat.

Besides, you had John (among other real friends), and he ended up liking you no matter how you acted, so that was just fine. He even bought you new shades from some crusty movie he made you watch and yeah okay it wasn’t _that_ bad so you wore the new digs because he saved up a lot of allowance money for you and that touched your otherwise unimpressed heart.

I mean, come on. The guy walked like forty dogs to buy you a pair of plain-looking sunglasses and make a “dawg” pun on your birthday card. It was sort of fantastic.

And as time slipped between the pages of your textbooks and your busily typing fingers, you started to realize that John was also sort of fantastic.

You were 15 and he was 14 (and a half) going on 15 when you had your first not-so-heterosexual experience.

A few of your old “friends” had been bi because it was supposedly edgy and politically correct, and you’d never really thought about it yourself until the night before you and John had a group Physics project due. There had been a lot of soda, sweat, glue, and tears spilled in the process of getting things done, but you guys managed to build the world’s best popsicle stick rollercoaster ever.

Sure, it was dangerous and the force applied to human beings given the scale of the thing would likely have been potentially deadly to small children (and regular-sized children), but that was what height limits were for. Besides, did Six Flags have a ride with a loop within a loop within a corkscrew that shot the cart through a ring of actual fire?

Didn’t think so.

You and John were complaining to each other about how everything sucked and Mr. Conners the Physics Teacher sucked and how having him next year for chem class sucked when you saw your very third dick.

The first being your own, of course.

The second was Bro’s in an unfortunate instance where you’d come home during private time with Lefty Handson.

It was weird.

We don’t talk about it.

But yeah, third dick.

John hadn’t been paying attention and he turned around to ask you if you’d seen his underwear and okay can I borrow a spare pair because I think I left mine at home.

It wasn’t big or small necessarily. It was circumcised, just like yours, so it didn’t really look like anything new.

Little John was just swinging there in the breeze and you stared at it from behind your shades because it was just there and it was just natural and you’d never seen a real penis with the exception of two other instances.

Not to say that you were attracted to this particular penis, but, as you found out later that night, it was hard to forget that people you were close to had real sexual organs and have real sex that involved other peoples’ sexual organs  interacting with their sexual organs.

Haha. Hard.

Needless to say, your interest in penis grew steadily over the next few weeks.

You tried not to peep on guys in the locker room because that was too weird, but if the opportunity ever presented itself, you hid your gaze behind your shades and peeked really quickly.

To clarify though, this didn’t stop you from having sex with your girlfriend at the time. Oh no. You two got it on a stupid amount of times in the three months that you two were together.

It was only when you found her poking a hole in a condom because she was sure you two would marry and be happy together if she had a kid that you realized just how bad things could get and how “it’s not you, it’s me, okay?” and how much getting slapped across the face could hurt.

And so, at the young age of 15, you became the guy with a crazy ex-girlfriend and a strange fascination with penis that went hand in hand with your already clear interest in vagina.

You sort of figured it was a phase until The Incident.

John came over to your house and you’d gone over to his a few times each between the project and then, and you guys were just lounging around in your underwear playing Super Smash Bros Brawl when you glanced at the bulge in John’s pants for the umpteenth time.

To be fair though, he started the whole thing, not you.

“Hey, Dave?” His fingers didn’t stop moving.

A-A-B-Toggle. “Yeah, man, what’s up?”

“Do you ever think about weird things?”

Down B-Toggle-Toggle-Up B-A. “Define weird, my big-toothed friend. The Strider Thought Archives show records of topics ranging from spontaneous gaseous combustion to tap dancing land fish.”

“Weird like sexy weird.”

Toggle-A-B-B-A-A-Z. “As candles and cream sexy weird or whipping it out and-”

“Like making out with your best friend weird.” Okay. Now he’d stopped moving.

B-B-Tog- What. “Uh.”

Oooh moment of truth. Moment of truth. MOMENT OF TRUTH.

You sat in awkward silence for a second because okay. You were John’s best friend, right? That was you. You were top dog, prince if platonic, muchacho extraordinaire.

Did you think about kissing your best friend?

…

Well you did just now.

Toggle-Up B. “Yeah. Why?”

“No reason.”

There was literally a twenty second window between that answer and John throwing himself off the edge of the platform to forfeit the game before he was awkwardly grabbing your face and pulling you to him and giving you the worst kiss of your life to date.

There was a lot of teeth and not a lot of tongue and if you had to relate it to an experience you’ve never had in your life, it was probably like kissing a beaver whose orthodontic treatment had just gone horribly, horrendously wrong.

It was so bad that you don’t even kiss him back. You’re just sort of shell-shocked by how awful it was, like “an 11-on-the-richter-scale code-red code-red alert the President that the whole continent is doing the Harlem Shake and it’s gonna bop to the top until everyone drops dead” level of awful, and its awfulness gave you this strange tingle in your chest.

Or at least, that’s what you told yourself.

And even so, when he was done (and you made a point of asking him “you done?” because you were a douchebag. It seems to be a Universal Constant.) you acted like you had something to prove and offered to give him “a totally hellacious lesson on how to get your real mack on.”

He improved really quickly, and the third time he kissed you, he gave you the third-best kiss of your life. Third best. Though at the time it was the first best and man oh man did it leave you tingly and breathless after your mouths parted ways.

The first thing that came out of your mouth was “I’m not gay, but that was pretty good.”

Future you twenty years down the road would smack yourself in the face remembering that something like that ever came out your mouth, so it’s a damn good thing that future you basically blocked the memory from ever existing ever again.

God, you were such a dick.

Anyways.

The two of you sort of went back to gaming in that awkward “I would totally do that again but idk if he wants to so let’s pretend nothing happened” sort of way.

The charged atmosphere faded out after a couple of critical hits and K.O.s, and it was like normal had gone out to get the mail and just settled back in again.

You two lived out age 15 and through 16 and 17 with the careless and reckless abandon that only teenage boys could live out. There were no stones left unturned, no streams left uncrossed. Well, of course, other than _that_ one.

But between three more ex-girlfriends, being on the track team, having your first real gay fling with some guy on the track team, being an advice columnist on the school paper (which you fondly recall as the Golden Age of Ask Abby), parties with alcohol, parties without alcohol, coming out to your brother (your main man, the Marlon to your Brando, your confidante) and only your brother as “maybe probably a bit bisexual,” and of course grades, your hands were basically tied. You didn’t really have time to pay attention to _that_ one.

Not to mention John had his own girlfriend, his first sexual experience (“Dave, I THINK she just asked me to have sex with her.” “John, it’s two a.m.”), coding club and the movie club and the student government, parties with alcohol, parties without alcohol, and his loving but slightly oven-crazy dad to work with.

Surprising how some people could just overlook the elephant in the room out of sheer willpower and a busy schedule).

You still thought about it though. Sometimes. While you were alone in your room late at night. You had a tendency to think to yourself _what would’ve happened if I’d said something?_ Of course, you didn’t expect anything in particular. They were just thoughts and besides you couldn’t possibly date your best friend that would be too cliché.

They were just thoughts and you were always thinking about the what ifs.

No biggie.

You staved off your curiosity ‘til senior prom. Maybe John did too. Who knows.

Either way, the two of you found yourselves dateless bachelors (John having been dumped the day before because the lunkhead had forgotten to ask his own girlfriend to prom – incredibly smooth, Casanova. – and you just flying solo because man your last girlfriend just really put you off from the dating scene for a while.) boredly waltzing around the grounds in your fancy rental tuxes and fresh from the grocery store corsages.

By then, both of you have sort of grown into your skin a little better. You’re leaning less towards gangly and more on the lithe side thanks to track. You have legs for days, an angular face, paler skin, and an amalgam of small freckles. John, on the other hand, is about average height with skin that isn’t the color of 2% dairy products and unruly hair. Hair in general. He has an indecent amount of body hair that settles on his broader physique nicely. It’s not like he’s hyper buff or anything; he’s just got higher definition shoulders than you and hefts a lot of boxes into the student supply closet.

You make a funny-looking duo, but at least the two of you have your shit sorted out.

At some point along the road of your long friendship, you and John had decided that you were the brains of the operations and he was the face. That is to say, you came up with all the stupid as all fuck ideas and John made them a reality.

Some of these ideas included: a toasted marshmallow gun (a marshmallow gun which was supposed to set its sweet, sweet projectiles aflame), the most bro-tastic drink in existence (a mountain dew+red bull+dorito fusion smoothie), the most effective poison in existence (the mountain dew+red bull+dorito fusion smoothie), and Deathonation (a virus that changed every song in a person’s iTunes library to Careless Whisper – the name of the program was completely irrelevant but so fucking cool that you guys couldn’t just not use it).

Obviously, you were brilliant.

Being brilliant meant that you were prepared with an escape plan and beer and no intention of going to anyone’s afterparty.

“C’mon, John, I know a place we can go and just chill,” you told him as the two of you buckled into the seats of your old sedan. “It’ll be fun.”

“I don’t know if going to miss the big party bus with all the sweaty gross people touching each other inappropriately and yarling from too much alcohol intake for you would be worth it, Dave,” he challenged, that ever-sarcastic grin creeping up on you.

You rolled your eyes under your shades. The ones John had given you, of course. You were rarely without them, but John knew that you were rolling your eyes. He just knew things like that. “I’ll get sweaty and grope you all you want if that’s what you need to have a good time, you sicko. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

He laughed and you laughed as you put the gear shift in reverse and pull out of the parking lot.

The two of you drove out to the middle of nowhere, just off Exit 5 of the highway and through a cluster of buildings that called itself a town.  Honestly, it was an arbitrary decision and you arbitrarily decided on an arbitrary place with no real significance to either of you.

At the edge of town, you two find a small lot next to a shoddy, rundown motel and park there. You’d been there a couple times with your middle school “friends.”

“Wow, Dave. Really romantic.” John climbed out of the car and stretched. “Do you bring all your ladyfriends here?”

“Only the special ones with sexy sasquatch legs.” There’s a clink of bottles as you fish two cases of beer and a picnic blanket out of your trunk.

Before the party got started, you made a quick run to the convenience store across the street for some good old Doritos and water – necessities to stave off hangovers.

The two of you lay out under the flickering streetlights and drink. The suits got fucked up in the process of the two of you getting fucked up but oh well.

When you were done drinking, the two of you talk. Mostly you though. You were lying on your side staring at him through the haze of alcohol and euphoria  just chattering on and on about oh man what a fucking wild year do you remember that time we pulled three all-nighters in a row because I’m pretty sure that totally fucked me up for life man like tbh I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m still sleeping off the aftereffects of it and this is all just a crazy dream like shit man what if our entire lives have just been one giant dream I mean like we’re all going about our lives but we’re really Rip Van Winkle or something oh god who’s dreaming though am I dreaming or are you dreaming or are we all the byproduct of someone else’s dreams holy shit John I think I’m giving myself an aneurism.

John laughed along, interjecting himself with drunken comments from time to time about how you’d be a shitty philosophy major and oh man, Dave are you excited for college?

You told him you were, because you were. You were excited to leave the skeezy, cramped halls of high school and get on with your life at last. You were excited to leave behind the dirty halls littered with shit that people can’t be bothered to throw in the trash can like two feet away. You were excited for teachers that don’t treat you like dirt on the ground.

You were not really excited to be separated from John though.

The two of you had already decided on different colleges, and you were sad about that, but that’s just the way the cookie crumbled, right?

Right.

He said he was excited too, and then he rolled over and kissed you.

You weren’t sure what to do, or if John was just really fucking drunk, so you just went with it, throwing one hand over his waist and nibbling at his lower lip. John shifted, cupped your cheek, and climbed on top of you without breaking the connection between your bodies. His tongue coaxed yours in a way that made your heart tremble and you wondered when he got this good at kissing as you grabbed the cuff of his suit jacket.

Just when shit was getting serious though (and you could tell it was getting serious because your lungs were about to explode from lack of air but GOD was this like a breath of fresh air), he pulled back, thank god. “Is it getting cold out here, or is it just me?” he asked with a shiver.

It was getting pretty cold, you realized, though your body was warm from the heat of your kiss. “I guess. Do you wanna go home? I can drop you off.”

John shook his head, motioned to the empty beer bottles littered on the grass around the two of you, and said you guys should probably check in at the shitty motel just off to the side. In retrospect, this seemed like the better idea and the one less likely to get the two of you killed, so you detangle yourselves from the mess of limbs and stumble over there.

There’s some bill splitting to be done and the tired looking lady at the counter treated you with about as much respect as you can expect from some underpaid graveyard shift worker who probably has two kids and never enough money. She asked if the two of you had a nice prom in the deadest voice possible, and said there were condoms in the vending machine (John let out a jittery laugh) as she dropped the brass key on the counter and turned her dead-inside eyes back on the small print of what was probably a raunchy scene in her shitty 99 cent novella.

You wre sort of chuckling about it until John stopped by the big black box on the way to the room and puts a dollar in and gets a small foil square and some coins back out. He gave you a sheepish grin and realization beatdown on you like you were Wile E. Coyote and that smile was a load of anvils rigged with cartoonish TNT that this is about to actually happen.

The door opens with a creak and closes with a slam as you shove him up against it. Fingers find your hair, his shirt buttons, skin. Everything is a flurry of movement and desperation while he pushes his hips against yours and you push yours back against his. It’s hot and the two of you are shedding clothing as he starts to walk you towards the bed.

When the back of your knees hit the edge of the mattress you let gravity do its job and fell back. Your shirt and jacket are splayed on the floor and John splayed on you. Your mouths met again and again and he moaned when you sucked on his lip – the sound went straight to your dick and shit fuck you were so ready for this, drunk or not.

The two of you passed whispers between your lips like small children passing folded paper notes over the aisles between your desks while the teacher’s back was turned.

He said he wanted you.

A tiny part of you said it may not be a good idea, because you were both kind of drunk. Because what if he doesn’t like it and wants you to stop? Because what if he likes it but he’s going away to better places and cooler people? Because it could wreck whatever fragile lines have been drawn and what will you have without the limits?

You told John that you wanted him too.

That tiny part of you was told to shut up and sit down for once and let you have this one thing.

It did, and soon the scattered piles of fine threads were met with slacks. The glasses bumped up and down on his nose as he rolled his body down against you while you pushed back up against him. Even with the two (thin, thin) layers of fabric between you, the feel of your dick sliding between the firm curves of his cheeks had your toes curling with anticipation.

The teasing eventually became too much. You thrusted upwards with enough rough force to throw him off balance and onto his side. The move earned you a groan of approval as you situated your hips between his legs and your mouth into the smooth angles of his neck.

By the time you’ve made your way downtown on him, you’ve left enough landmarks on his skin (especially along the inside of those hellacious thighs) to let a pirate know exactly where the buried treasure was. Not that Redbeard or Petey Pegleg would ever EVER find it because you were rolling down his briefs and going for the gold.

His dick was different from how you remembered it, most likely as a result of a good three or so years of development since the gay agenda had flat out smacked you upside the head. Not big, not small, fit in the ring of your hand and tasted about as regular and fleshy as any other dick. Except this was John’s dick –THE dick – and that made a world of difference as far as just how enthusiastic you were to lick, suck, and touch.

The sounds he made while you had his dick in your mouth were music to your ears, and you sort of learned the ins and outs of exactly what actions drew what sounds from him.

“Dave- shit, Dave stop stop stop,” he slurred after a minute of you taking him down to the root and back. His fingers were in your hair tugging and gripping and your shoulders tensed up like oh god were you doing a bad job, had you accidentally bitten him, was he having a sudden affliction of how straight he was.

You didn’t ask him any of that because you’re lame, but you’re not _that_ lame. Just sort of popped your mouth off of him and said “sup?”

He was breathing heavily and had his arm thrown over his eyes. “I don’t want to jizz in your mouth. That’s gross and I’m not kissing you if you smell like my penis.”

You laughed kind of really loudly because holy shit you thought he had actually wanted to _stop_ and you would totally have had to respect that otherwise the whole thing would have become a totally whack scenario. He tells you to shut up and smacks you with the hand he had nestled up in your hair because “dick breath just seems really gross and I don’t wanna have it okay?”

“Okay alright hop off it already,” you say, pushing yourself up to lay your mouth all over his skin.

In the end, the two of you don’t get jiggy with it. Not all the way, anyways.

The general invention of frottage is quote “totally brilliant” end quote, in John’s words (“even if dicks look like weird, fleshy slugs sometimes.” “Wow, John, try not to use such filthy words in the bedroom. I may just cum again dry if you keep up the explicit use of gastropod metaphors.” “Shut up, Dave.”)

Thus commenced round two.

The condom sits unused on the dresser, and you know you will later tuck it into your wallet as a (completely fucking weird) memento. Sometimes, you think you’ll forget things if you don’t indulge your hoarding habits.

You sit back, sedated and sweaty and blossoming nicely with darkening love bites which pseudo-mirror John’s, and the general deflowering of your virginity.

As sex-high as you are though, you can’t bring yourself to fall asleep just yet. Instead, you opt to sober up a little while staring upon the sleeping visage of thine bed partner.

(“You’re not a bed-wetter, are you?” “Holy shit, Dave, fuck off.”)

There’s a weird hollowing pit that makes a home in your stomach, like the feeling you get when an adult says that they “Want to have a word with you, Mr. Strider,” or when you stare at the empty wrappers and bags of a Taco Bell dinner five-minutes-past.

Rose would identify the feeling as dread, hesitance, or possibly forbearance clung to like a life raft because you’re a lifestyle sailor with an incredible fear of drowning. But you, who pretty often just feels way too hard and too deep, like to pretend you’re not as smart as her (she sees right through you) so that you have an excuse to forget and stop your brain from rotting from the inside out.

Words bubble to the surface violently and knock at your teeth as you brush some hair out of John’s face. You swallow them like you’re that many mouthed dog bitch Scylla from Greek mythology and they’re unwanted ships in your territory.

He rolls over in his sleep and you wake up a couple hours later from a sleep that snuck up on you and tapped you on the shoulder before straight up cold-clocking you across the jaw. The sheets are warm and so are you. They smell like childhood and growing up and something scarier than growing up but what the fuck is scarier than growing up?

You sit up with a bleary blink and scan the room that is not yours but could become yours.

The bathroom door opens. John steps out with the steam of a fresh shower rolling around at his feet. He’s got one hand rubbing absently at a dark bite on his neck.

You do your damndest not to look.

(No you don’t.)

He sees you upright in the bed and gives you a sheepish grin. The one that you hate (No you don’t.) because it’s so boyish and easy and you know that nothing has really changed and it takes a spade to that hole which you mentioned in passing.

“I’ve always wanted to do that,” he admits to you, like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

 _You have no idea,_ you say.

(No you don’t.)

**Author's Note:**

> so i've been working on this since november-ish and originally this was going to be one GIANT fic but i figured id splice it up because its a bit slow-going on the writing end
> 
> i'm pretty sure there will be 3 (but maybe 4?) chapters


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